Most coming-of-age stories deal in the vagaries of adolescence — that confusing time defined by dramatic confrontations with unfamiliar feeling. But Sarah Friedland’s affecting debut Familiar Touch, remixing the genre, considers the emotional valence of older adulthood.

The film, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in the Orizzonti section, follows Ruth Goldman, an inquisitive octogenarian played by Kathleen Chalfant, as she grapples with the realities of her dementia and comes to terms with moving into an assisted living facility. 

Movement guides Familiar Touch. From the opening moments of this graceful feature, Friedland zeroes in on the minor details of bodies in motion. We meet Ruth as she rummages through her closet. The camera (cinematography by Gabe C. Elder) stays on the nape of her neck as the slow screech of clothing hangers sliding across a rod accelerates into a frenzied rattle, a measure of her desperation. The film cuts, with an unfussy transition by editors Aacharee “Ohm” Ungsriwong and Kate Abernathy, to Ruth preparing lunch. A toaster dings and out pops a crisp slice of bread. Without skipping a beat, Ruth, a lifelong cook, places it on the dishrack. This is one of many jarring yet delicately composed sequences that explore the tactile elements of memory loss with a gentle curiosity. 

Friedland’s interest in this subject is at once intellectual and personal. The director is a choreographer whose experimental works consider the poetry and politics of physical gestures. In Movement Exercises, her trilogy of short films released over a five-year period, she probed the idea of communal exercise, whether at home with aging adults practicing fitness routines or in school with younger participants re-enacting Boy Scout drills. These are antecedents to Familiar Touch, which is filled with moments observing how subtle actions — a hand on a chest or finger on a wrist — are their own modes of communication.

In a 2023 interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Friedland reflected on witnessing her grandmother’s move into a care facility, and how her waning verbal capacity didn’t foreclose connection. “We spoke about her as if she were less and less there,” the director said of her family, “but as someone working with movement, she was still so present to me through other forms of sense-making, like touch and through the rhythm of the way she’d rock her body.” 

In Familiar Touch, Friedland develops a striking and sensitive grammar for understanding the experiences of elderly adults. She anchors us in Ruth’s perspective and captures the tumult of memory loss through elegant close-ups, a spare use of music and nimble transitions between different angles. Evidence of this steady confidence translates to the screenplay, which Friedland also wrote. The narrative adopts the loose structure of memories. Unencumbered by the conventions of storytelling, Friedland harnesses the potential of withholding details and eases viewers into Ruth’s life. 

In the middle of preparing lunch, Ruth welcomes a visitor, a reserved younger man (H. Jon Benjamin) whose anguish is apparent from the moment he walks through the front door. They nibble on sandwiches and exchange pleasantries. There are signs of a one-sided romantic interest, but they’re quickly muted by the facts of the situation: The man’s name is Steve; he is Ruth’s son; and he’s come to help her move to Bella Vista, an assisted living facility she chose when her cognitive abilities were stronger.

Ruth is devastated by this information, which she learns during the drive to, and in the lobby of, Bella Vista. How rapidly dementia makes the known unknown and the past feel like the present. 

Chalfant’s dedicated work gives shape to Ruth, a headstrong woman renegotiating her identity in Bella Vista. Transferring to assisted living is not a loss, but it does require Ruth, so defined by her independence and game attitude toward life, to figure out where she fits. Chalfant portrays Ruth’s searching with sensitivity, finding the humor and tenderness in more vulnerable moments. Her commitment to excavating Ruth’s emotional interiority allows the character to shapeshift: Ruth as a mother to Steve; as a patient to her care workers, Vanessa (Carolyn Michelle) and Brian (Andy McQueen); and as a young girl recalling the summers of her youth.

Chalfant is the center around which all of these other performances — equally sensitive and never too overwrought — revolve. Friedland employs a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors here, enlisting residents of a real assisted care facility as extras. Michelle and McQueen are particularly notable as care workers whose dedication to the job clarifies, rather than overshadows, their personal lives. In one particularly striking moment, the two employees reflect on their own responsibilities with aging parents and note the difference in the care they can afford. 

As Vanessa and Brian talk, Ruth watches the two from the window of her room. There are glimmers of tension that become more apparent during Ruth’s check-ins with Brian. The patient, in a spicy turn, is crushing on the doctor. The film is not merely an observation of aging. It is also about how this process echoes the emotional dramas of adolescence, and Friedland liberates the story of older adults from the confines of melancholy.

Like any good coming-of-age movie, Familiar Touch never condescends. It takes its protagonist’s experience with dislocation, unrequited love and the desire to be understood quite seriously.